And now 3 games of our newly acquired Innovation Ultimate!
I’m blaming @Acacia for this. Kate and I used to play on BGA all the time, but something changed with the scaling on a phone which made it unusable.
Up pops an invite from across the Atlantic, I remember how good the game is and now we have an enormous box on our shelf.
Speaking of which……
Unseen is the easiest to add. So far I like Echoes of the Past the most.
Those 2 and Cities of Destiny were the ones Ive played so far.
More Airecon!
Molly House: I think every time I’ve played this, someone has said that it sounds like monopoly during the rules explanation. Usually followed half an hour into the game by an exclamation that it’s not like any other game they’ve played. I really like Molly House, the theme is unique and ties together well with the mechanics, which is just as well because it would be a nightmare to explain the card play otherwise.
Wingspan: played with the new Americas expansion, which adds a bunch of extra bird cards but also a completely new mechanic centred around hummingbirds. Now whenever you take one of the habitat actions you also get a hummingbird action. The hummingbirds are a deck of smaller cards that are set out in a “hummingbird garden” and they are either attracted to your board or return to the garden with every action, giving a small bonus each time. I think it nicely captures the way hummingbirds flit around as they fly 
Forest Shuffle: This is very satisfying - building up a nice combotastic tableau of trees and woodland creatures. 50% of the players immediately went and bought a copy. It would have been 75% if we weren’t all in the same gaming group and therefore don’t need that many duplicates!
Things in Rings: This feels like a cross between Knitwit and Zendo. The setup is a set of three overlapping circles (Venn diagram style), each of which is associated with a rule relating to the name, context, or attributes of a thing. One player knows the rules and the others have to get rid of their hand of five thing cards by correctly placing them in the rings and thus working out the rules. When I was the “knower” I had as my rules:
Which led to a discussion of whether, topologically speaking, a wardrobe has any holes.
Agent Avenue: an interesting two-player I split you choose game that my friend brought back from Essen last year. The board is a short circular track, with each player starting on opposite sides. You win by catching up with the other player. Movement is determined by picking one of two cards chosen by the other player, one played face up and the other face down. The person deciding which two cards will be played keeps the other card. Having multiples of the same card changes the power of the card, so you can end up accidentally moving backwards by picking the wrong card.
Skull: Always hilarious
That’s not a hat: The pop culture (green) edition. I wonder whether it would be tricky to play this with anyone under 30, because some of the pictures are a bit niche.
Century Spice Road: turn cubes into other cubes for points!
Plus more plays of Flip 7 and Schadenfreude.
Yeah, Echoes is the community favorite.
Unseen is the simplest and Cities is also very light from a game changing angle. Echoes is in the middle. Artifacts & Figures are, reportedly, bonkers and wildly vacillate the power level of the game. But Figures has a nice catch up mechanism.
I’m really jonesing to try them all.
I don’t get credit blame for La Granja Deluxe?
There I recommend Grand Markers first - I’d never play without unless teaching someone who is hesitant for their first game.
Then Colchonera, as it’s also very light rules-wise and doesn’t change the core game, but it makes climbing the siesta track just a bit more meaningful and leans into that wrinkle that is only an afterthought in the base game.
It was implied!
A few weeks ago, I was moving things around in my office and my oldest daughter noticed my Go stones for the first time. She asked what they were and I started telling her about Go. That night, we sat down and I kind of showed her the basics of how to play. She seemed to have a knack for understanding the influence of the stones on the board, so I complimented her on her natural intuitiveness- she somehow decided that this meant she was better than me at Go, and that she “won” the game we played (I was merely showing her examples of play and how formations come to be and exert control over the board).
I rejected her conclusion and said that we would find time to play a game “soon”. She was persistent.
My partner and I, separate of this Go interaction, had discussed making time to spend 1-on-1 with our children, finding time for both her and I to go somewhere and do something with a child as a way of giving them full attention. When I brought up last week that Spring Break might be a good opportunity for one of the older two (who are normally in school during the week) to have a Daddy And Daughter date, my oldest was insistent that we go to the local boardgame cafe and play Go, so she could win.
Today, we went to the local boardgame cafe, paid WAY too much for a boba drink for her, and took along my Go stones and goban (they don’t list Go as a game they have available at the cafe, despite hundreds of games).
We played on 13x13 (because I don’t seem to have a 9x9 board anymore?), and I offered a lot of instruction to her as we played. She played well, but Go is a game of experience more than anything else, and I won handily- we did not calculate the score.
She was, of course, devastated because she was sure that she would win. I was proud of how well she picked up the nuance of how stones create strength on the board (something that, certainly, would have been beyond me at her age). Now, I fear she will not want to play again.
Incidentally, after the first interaction, I went out on Youtube and checked if there were any good Go content creators and found… uh, nothing that caught my eye. But I did stumble across a fantastic Chess youtube channel and have, for the first time in my life, become interested in Chess (and Chess Variants, which is actually the primary thrust of said channel; however, the player has a great understanding of Chess itself and approaches Chess variants using Chess fundamentals). I’ve been watching Chess videos fairly regularly for the last few weeks and have even played a few games on chess.com. Mostly against bots, but a few against real people… which creates such a dreadful feeling of anxiety that I cannot even explain (I do not like mathematical rating systems, it seems).
Wingspan with the new Americas expansion
It definitely makes the game longer, since you get an extra hummingbird action every time you activate one of the habitat rows. I expect it would get faster with players who are more familiar with the new module and you could speed things up by having the next turn start while you do your hummingbird action. I might be inclined to try starting with one fewer action cube next time and see how that affects things.
Smartphone Inc - I remember that it was bad. After several years, it is even worse than how I remember it.
HOT STREAAAAK!! - this is the GOTY of the Isleworth Club. It was no one’s number 01, but enough 2’s and 3’s made it a winner with a solid lead against Pandemic: LOTR, which is in 2nd place. Frodo’s Crew is in 3rd place.
Wavelength
Chinatown Z-Man edition - I now own this! It’s a good “everyone” game. Not as good as SideCon in depth, but sometimes, we need a jolly but big game like this and Acquire that fits everyone.
Bohnanza
Jerusalem - the owner said it’s better than El Grande. It is fun, but I prefer El Grande.
Gods Love Dinosaurs - predators eat prey, and dinos eat predators. It’s like Cascadia but on the next level in complexity. I’m incline to say that it’s a good game for an MPS tile layer, but there isn’t much here once you played it enough. But we’ll see. I like the timing issue where you want to deplete a column so a type of animal can reproduce. We even took tiles from a column so that one player’s dinos starve (since the player neglected putting food in) and so their dinos all die.
Big Bang 13.7 - tile laying about planets and comets on a shared space. You could have told me it’s a Knizia and I would have believed you.
Take Time
Factory of Dreams - the theme of this game is Celebrities. We scored 1/20
The Estates - still an amazing game! Perhaps the best one-round auction out there.
Paperback - ncie quick fire deckbuilder. That immediately makes it more fun than a lot of these deckbuilders. Dominion is still the best, ofc.
Hardback ftw! 
(though I haven’t played in ages)
Can you elaborate on the “fits everyone” a little bit? I have not played either of these games and statements like that make me curious.
Acquire and Chinatown arent that complex with their ruleset nor are they deep. Chicago Express, for example, is opaque in contrast and new players dont know what is going on. Also, these two games give enough feedback that the players feel something when they play.
Ooh, you’ve inspired me to break this out again. Only played it once at 2p, so I’m interested to know how it’ll fare at 5.
In a recent round of getting rid of some games, I actually chose Paperback to keep and Hardback to go (though it went to a friend, so not really gone). I just prefer the simpler game and it’s a bit quicker.
Two solos of Frosted Blooms.
Very pretty. Not yet sure about the gameplay.
The bot is very well done for the solo mode. I forgot to take a picture but you just lay out cards overlapping and feels very smooth.
So basic gameplay goes like this:
Play 10 turns and then score the improvements, the track from the scoring cards and whatever bonusses you claimed. The improvements value 3/10/25 points and so do the bonusses. So the small stuff is worth almost nothing but the big stuff can decide the game easily.
For such a small game there is a lot of objectives pulling in different directions: do I go for lots of enclosures and big improvements? Do I choose a tile that allows me to get a big score of one of my cards? Which bonusses can I get to before the others/bot?
It’s quite crunchy I think for a game so light on rules. But also a bit opaque during my first two games. I lost the first game badly and did much better in the second game. I am not sure if I learned to do better immediately or if I just got lucky through “random” choices.
I also played a 3 handed learning game of Rainbow: nice simple ruleset!
And 3 rounds of Bandidas the first two I lost … badly too and the third was ridiculously short:
Hot Streak! With four players. I profited from a Risky Dangle.
Magical Athlete, still underwhelming. Legs was simply unbeatable, Mouth devastated the board.
Oh, and The Cat Game, which I’m told is telestrations with added cats. It was fine. Arrange some cats in poses and then marker pen draw over them to make an eg: hairdresser, first to guess it while you’re drawing gets a point.
Not sure how I would have illustrated for the answer of the movie Apocalypse Now, but basketball players and barbers were fine.
boat with roof, winding river, blobby human figure at the end
Neighbourly games on Monday included another Spirit Island run. Last time with these players it was great, it all fit together. This time nothing seemed to work and we just got gradually overrun. I don’t think we were making any rules errors on either occasion. Hey ho.
Last night at Thirsty Meeples, current hotness Night Soil. I think we were very restrained in the matter of giggles.
The game itself has a lot of moving parts and it’s the sort of thing at which I usually do very badly, so I was very surprised to win (by one point). You place worker meeples in regions of London, who bring soil with them, which restricts how much a space can be used. Some spaces get you more labourer cards (not the same thing as workers), some let you curry favour with a patron faction (the sub-board to the left), some let you place your marker in a neighbourhood, etc.
Then you play those labourer cards in rotation to move cubes around (either to another neighbourhood or, if you’re nearly there already, into the Thames). If you clear an area then on your next turn you can claim credit for it… assuming nobody else has moved cubes into it in the meantime. That claiming credit is the only way you’ll get back worker meeples (which are of neutral colour, not belonging to you) for the next round of play.
It’s very much an abstraction-gap game for me (the decisions in play don’t feel very much like the decisions a night-soil operator would have made) and while I had a good time I wouldn’t rush to play it again. (Though knowing how it works from the start would definitely make it go faster.)
Frosted Blooms me vs the bot: my second win
I want to show off the solomode cards.
The game is too short at 10 turns and somehow lacks the satisfaction of building up your landscape in Cascadia, Harmonies or Small Fjords. I think I’m having a bit of expectation mismatch here. my usual tile laying fare is different
Last night we finished our campaign of Warhammer Quest Dark Waters which… was fine. There’s actually two endings… the Act III ending, and then a single Act IV mission in which you fight all the bosses of the game in sequence before pushing the last boss into holy water.
Act III was almost trivial. By sheer luck, our main damage dealer got a bunch of gear that allowed him to reroll misses, make additional attacks, and inflict extra damage, so much so that in a single activation he took the boss from full health to dead and had attacks and rerolls remaining to do it again if needed. But Act IV was… whatever is beyond trivial. So easy as to be a little boring? Our main damage dealer didn’t even get a chance to hit the final boss, because our Utility Player decided to go Hulk-Mode and killed the final-final boss (three times, as required, to push him in the water). We still had 2 more heroes to activate if he failed, and as mentioned, one of them was our big hitter.
So. Having finished the campaign… my opinion is basically the same as when we started. Blackstone Fortress is better in almost every way, Cursed City is worse in almost every way, except Cursed City still has the best character progression and Blackstone Fortress could really use the exceptional book-map thing they released for Dark Waters. Also, BSF plays a little slower than DW, but that’s a sidestep, rather than an improvement or a detriment.
Regardless, it was a nice little RPG-lite, and I think everyone had fun.
Next up for this group of players: Sleeping Gods! Last time I played was during the pandemic, so I am very much looking forward to diving back into it. I wonder if I will still want to play it again after this 2nd playthrough… tonight is Frosthaven (different group of players), and then Sunday is Twilight Imperium IV with all the bells and whistles.
Life is hard (like, legitimately hard), but there are moments like these that are pretty okay. Not everything sucks.
First game (and first solo) of Nusfjord.
Steve looks at which buildings are available: buying lots of ships is a good strategy with this selection!
It gets to round 6 and Steve has forgotten to buy lots of ships. Steve has been busy realising how more efficient he could have been 1 move after it’s too late, multiple times. And the plan to generate loads of wood and sell it for gold (thanks to a building) turned into a final move of serving up the huge excess of fish for far more gold. Because literally nothing went to plan.
I still scored 25 points on my first ever play, when “good players will score 30-40 points” (on the solo), which I’m very happy with.
This is a keeper. I immediately want to play again. The solo mode is incredibly simple to run, there are loads of different building decks in the Big Box, this has “repeat plays for the next week” written all over it.
Also: first game took an hour with frequent referencing of the instructions.
Second game took 25 minutes and I scored 29.
Only 3 actions per round is really tight, makes it very quick once you’ve learned the basics.
